Adsense is a great way to earn fast money from blogging. Recently I came across some people who were under the impression that Google automatically inserted Adsense ads into your blog/website after you have made a certain number of posts.

Contrary to popular belief, however, Google is not all-powerful (yet ), and does not have direct control over the content of websites and blogs. In other words, the only way for Adsense to appear in your blog is for YOU to put it there. This is a “short” guide that outlines the procedure  step-by-step for newcomers who want to monetize and get in on pay per click affiliate marketing.

** A prerequisite to this guide for installing Adsense into your blog is, for one thing, actually having a blog. The more traffic it gets, the better. If you’re looking to make any serious amount of money with Adsense, you’ll want to check out my free suggestions for promoting your blog.

Step 1)  Register an Adsense Account Your first stop is the Google Adsense Website, where you are able to sign up for a free Adsense account of your very own.

** Google requires that new users submit a bit of personal information, but don’t let that stop you. This is a huge, reputable, professional company that you’re dealing with here. Your personal details are in safe hands.

For more info, check out Google’s Privacy Policy.

Required information on the sign up form includes the following:

• Website URL (This can be a free website like Blogspot or WordPress.
• Full name (This is who they address your checks to, so be honest!)
• Address (This is where they send your checks!)
• Valid Telephone #
• Valid email address (This is your Adsense login name)

Once you’ve completed the form, it will be submitted to Google for review. This generally takes several days, and afterwords they apparently contact you via email to let you know if you’ve been approved or not. I say “apparently” because I haven’t heard from them once since I registered! About a week after I submitted the application I checked to see if my account was active yet – I was able to login with the email and password I chose, and everything was ready for me to start setting up ads. Hopefully, when you sign up Google will take a little better care of you.

Step 2) Create Some Ads! Once you (suposedly) get your confirmation email and have your account approved, you will be able to login to the Adsense website with the email address and password you registered. After you log in, you’ll get your first look at the layout of you new personal online money making device. The first thing you’ll no doubt notice looks something like this:

Today’s Earnings: $0.00

Fear not! This will be changing all too soon. You’ll also notice the blue and white tabs along the top of the page, beneath the Google logo. The blue tab is the page that you are currently viewing. In your case, it will be the “Reports” tab, which is the first in the list.

** The Reports tab shows you available statistics on the various ads you’ve created, including  the number of clicks and  your earnings (updated daily) as well as your total earnings. Since you don’t have any ads yet, this page isn’t very useful to you right now. You want to click on the Adsense Setup tab.

Once you’re on the Adsense Setup page, take a moment to just look around and absorb what you’re seeing. If you look directly below the blue and white tabs, you’ll see a blue bar with white links in it. These are the subpages of the page you’re currently viewing. The one that is bolded and not underlined is the currently active subpage (shown here, the Get Ads page.)

Let’s Get Some Ads

There are five different types of advertisements offerd by Google on the Get Ads page. You can click on each one to view more information about it, and also view at the accompanying example picture. I’ll go ahead and give you a brief overview of them anyways:

• Adsense for  Content - The most commonly seen type of Adsense. Displays ads based on keywords pulled directly from the content of your website. Text/Images
• Adsense for Search – A search box users can use to perform a Google search directly from your site. You get a commision for any ads displayed on the result page that they click on.
• Adsense for Feeds – If you have an RSS Feed (and you should) through Google Feedburner, you can use this to automatically displayed scaled and contextual ads in it.
• Adsense for Domains – Used to display ads on parked domains, you probably won’t ever use this.
• Adsense for Mobile Content – Used to display ads on websites designed for cell phone users, you probably won’t ever use this either.

All right, let’s get to it!

As you will in most cases be using Adsense for Content, that’s a good place to begin. Go ahead and click on the link. The design process is actually quite simple. You begin by selecting if you want to display Text Ads, Image Ads, or a combination of the two. (This means that you create a single ad and place it on your website, and every time a new visitor views it Google will choose whether or not it displays text ads or an image ad.) Once you’ve got this sorted out, click the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page and Google will walk you through the rest of the necessary steps to finish designing your ad.

** Once you’re pretty comfortable with the design process and understand all your options, the next time you create an ad you can click the link that says “Single Page.” This eliminates the Wizard that walks you through each step and allows you design your entire ad on a single page. Definitely a time-saver.

After you’ve selected all the parameters for your ad and clicked the button that says “Submit and Get Ad Code” you’ll see a box containing the unique HTML code for your ad.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created your first Adsense ad.

And it was easy too. Unfortunately, the tricky part has yet to come. For your new baby ad to actually show up where you want it to on your blog, you have to dig into your site’s innards and paste the code Google gives you directly into the source. I know, sounds bad. Depending on your website and wether or not you’re using a blogging service (BlogSpot, Blogger, LiveJournal,) this could be a pain.

** I use WordPress and whole-heartedly recommend it. There are plugins available that automate the whole process for you, and can even automatically repeat the ad on each individual post you make.

If your site has a WYSIWYG (“What You See is What You Get” – think Microsoft Word type text editing) editor for adding new posts / pages, look around for an option to view the site’s HTML. My WordPress “Add New Post” interface has an HTML tab conveniently located on the top right corner of the content box, which allows me to seamlessly toggle between visual editing and the underlying markup.

Getting the placement of the ad can be a bit tricky at first. A good strategy that I often use is to take a look at your website in a new browser window, and make a note of several prominate keywords located throughout the page. Find one that is near the spot in your site where you want your Adsense ad to appear (for example, if you want the ad in your sidebar, pick out several unique words or phrases that appear in your sidebar. In my case, I could use “Popular Articles”, “Categories”, or “Tags”, as these are all headers shown in my sidebar.)

After you’ve got the HTML of your site opened up, do a Ctrl+F search for your chosen keyword. If you paste your ad’s code near this word, than your ad is almost guaranteed to show up close to it. Save your HTML, then view your website in a new browser window to see how you did. It may take a few attempts to get the formatting just right. Here are a couple tips to keep in mind to help the whole job go a bit smoother:

- Pay attention to the HTML tags surrounding the keyword you used for reference and be careful not to disrupt them! An HTML tag consists of two parts: the opening tag and the closing tag. Here’s an example:

<a href=”somelink.com”>Click Here!</a>

Your opening tag is shown in red, and your closing tag in blue. This is a basic example, as HTML tags can be nested infinitely deep. If you paste your ad code in between the two halves of one or more tags, wonky things will happen. A safe bet is to look for the end tag, click to the right of it and hit “Enter” to insert a new line. This is where you paste your ad code.

- You can insert as much white space into the code as you like, it doesn’t affect anything. Once you pick out where you plan to paste the ad code as described above, hit “Enter” five or six more times to insert a good chunk of blank space (it won’t reflect on your actual website). Paste your code two or three lines down, right in the middle of it so there are two or three lines of white space above and below the ad code, clearly distinguishing it from the rest of the source. This makes it much easier to tweak your ad’s placement, as you will have to cut and paste the entire block of code to relocate the ad.

- And finally, use the ” <br /> ” tag to add space above and below the ad. This tag inserts a line break onto your actual website in the same way that hitting “Enter” inserts a break in your HTML document. So, if the top or bottom of the ad appears too close to the surrounding content, make use of the ” <br /> ” tag to give it some breathing room.

There you have it, folks, 1700+ coma-inducing words of blog-monetizing awesomeness.  Please do let me know via your comments if I’ve succeeded in making this article as comprehensive as humanly possible (well maybe not that much, but I’d still say it’s pretty darn impressive!) and if you have any additional questions you’d like answered regarding Adsense, blogging, HTML, the meaning of life, tacos, or the Archbishop of Cantebury.

To your success!

Tagged as: Afilliate Marketing, Earn Money Blogging, easy, How to Get Money, Make Money, Monetizing, Pay Per Click, quick, Tutorial

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